The 4 approach challenge (or an attempt to rethink in place of complain)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I'm a believer in what might be considered the eclectic grumbling approach to language teaching.  You see, I love to read theory and I'm aways geeked when I can find something which changes the way I view my own teaching or looks like it will make my classes (and hence my students experience in class) a bit better.  But in finding that one good idea for a lesson, or a theory that tilts my perspective a degree or so, I more often than not find myself focusing on all the things I can't use.  In short, I'm a complainer, a kvetch as my mother used to say, and I will worry over a minor point of theory the way my grandfather basked in the pain of his always aching back teeth.  But lately I'm starting to wonder if all this negativity isn't getting in the way of what I have to offer my students.  And who am I anyway, to pass judgment on people who put in enough thought and work to actually make an approach to language teaching?  I've made some pretty groovy flash cards, but an approach?  So, in an effort to improve myself, I decided to engage in a little thought experiment.  I'll take 4 approaches, in the form which I find most troubling, and make a lesson plan or series of lessons for each.  To give the experiment a little continuity, I will try and develop lessons which might cover similar material.  These lessons will be neither time limited nor bounded by material or monetary constraints.  They will, in short, be my attempt to provide the fullest and richest possible environment in which to explore the merits of each approach. 

So let's start things off with…

TBL (Task Based Learning), and none of that weak form for me please. I'm talking pure TLB as posited by Skehan (1996), in which, "a strong form would argue that tasks should be the unit of language teaching." And in keeping with the spirit of strong form TLB, their will be no predetermined linguistic forms and no tasks which overtly focus on form.  

To take a hypothetical lesson, I need a hypothetical group of students.  I'm gonna have to just completely randomly go with lower intermediate high school students in Japan on this one.  So students are in place, in their chairs, and ready to learn.  Now I need a "unit of language teaching," AKA task/series of tasks.  How about: (Getting to know your classmates) Picking the perfect classroom language partner for your co-learners.  The Perfect Language Partner (PLP) Network!

Task 1 (Pre-Task?): Watch a video of a PLP member introducing themselves.  Encourage students to pay attention to the content of the PLP member's self introduction, and decide if they would want to be language partners with the PLP him.

The video would be about a minute long and the script might go something like this:

"Hi, my name is Tobi.  I'm 17 years old.  I'm a pretty relaxed guy.  But sometimes I get frustrated.  I often study, but it takes me a long time to learn something new.  I like to watch TV.  I usually watch detective shows, but occasionally I'll watch a basketball game.  I love animals and have 3 dogs and 2 cats.  I almost never go on vacation, because I have to take care of my pets.  But I hardly every feel like I'm missing out, becase my pets are the best friends in the world. Oh, I almost forgot.  I really like music.  I often go to concerts and have even met some famous musicians.  If you become my language partner, I'll tell you all about it."    

Task 2: Listen to the video again and have students make a list of the things that would make Tobi a good or a bad language partner for them.

Task 3: Students for small groups and work together to create a "Personal Introduction Brochure," For the PLP Network.  The brochure must contain a pie chart on how students spend their free time, a time line showing the student's typical day, and a short paragraph to describe the student's personality.  Although working in groups, each student is responsible for having their own completed Personal Introduction Brochure ready for the next task.

Task 4: In groups of three, students play the role of the PLP-Network interview team.  Using the brochures produced in Task 3,  each group creates a list of interview questions for perspective PLP members (that would be the other students in class) and conducts a pre-determined number of video interviews.  And seeing as how planning time leads to richer and longer discourse (Willis, D. & Willis, J, 2001), groups will have as much time as necessary to produce the interview questions and to make a plan for how the interview will be conducted.  Of course, there will be one video camera available for each group as well as a laptop computer onto which to easily and quickly dump the video once it is taken (ah…thought experiments).

Task 5: Making a match.  A booklet of all Personal Introduction Brochures from Task 3 is produced and one copy given to all students.  Students watch the videos of all the PLP-Network member introductions.  After having watched all the videos, class members fill out a Preliminary Language Partner Pairs Form on which they match up their classmates.  While watching the videos for a second time, they should write the reasons for their pairings.  At the end of the lesson, the teacher collects the Preliminary Language Partner Pairs Form and announces the language partner results in the next class.  Students work with their selected language partner for the rest of the week. 

Follow Up/Public Report:  At the end of the weeks, pairs present on how well they felt they suited each other as language partners, how and why (or how not and why not) the PLP Network was successful, and anything else they would like to share with the class about the PLP Network experience.

And here ends the thought experiment for a TBL approach.  So what did I get out of it?  Well, my main quibble with TBL has always been my belief that language should drive a language course.  I'm not big on tasks in my classes in general and the idea of making tasks the unit of language learning just seemed kind of…well crazy to me.  If you've read some of my earlier posts, you known that I'm much more of a text--especially written text--kind of guy.  But I can see now that I had somehow convinced myself that task was not text, which is just plain wrong.  Because even in TBL (or my dream version of it here), there is clearly an oral text which will be built over the course of the unit and all parts of each task are very clearly driven by language.  And I can especially appreciate how a series of tasks like this might provide learners with an opportunity to move from, "reproductive language use…to creative language use." (Nunan, 2004, p. 20)  If I had the time, money and video cameras, I might even try this series of lessons out on my students.  So my rethink of TBL has given me one less thing to kvetch about.  And yet, somehow, that doesn't exactly make me happy.  But I don't think that's TBL's fault.

Next up:  The Lexical Approach or The Inigo Montoya Effect in action 

(Woops, this morning I woke up and remembered one of the best pure TBL examples I've ever read is right over on Kevin Giddens fantastic Do Nothing Teaching blog.  So if you want to read about how something like the above might play out in real life, and not just in my head, definitely check out the "Teddy Bears, Bookmaking and CEOS" post.  And not suprisingly, Michael Griffin had a hand in it as well.)

 

References:

Nunan, D. (2004) Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skehan, P. (1996) A Framework for the Implementation of Task-based Instruction. Applied Linguistics 17 (1), 38-62.

Willis, D. and Willis, J. (2001) In R. Carter and D. Nunan (Eds) The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A Name for All Things (short fiction for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

556 words total
98.19% of words within GSL
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 2.89
Flesch Reading Ease Level: 93.47

My grandma could give a name to anything.  On the corner of the one small park near my house, there was a strong looking walnut tree.  My grandma always hit its trunk and called it ‘Big Daddy Caramel’.  Soon, so did everyone else.  One summer, a great cloud of butterflies landed in the empty lot behind our house.  A few hours later they flew off, leaving one behind.  One bright orange butterfly with round wings.  My grandma called it ‘Little Lost Tomato-Chan’.  Even now, when I walk through a summer garden, I wonder if that butterfly ever found its way home.

My grandma was old before I was born.  Her hair was silver.  Her eyes were light blue with a touch of white here and there.  But I never thought of her as old.  She called me ‘Sugar’, ‘Spring a Whistling’, and ‘Bitter Tea’.  Whatever name she used, it was always right.  The right name for how I was feeling deep on the inside.  

My mother was a nurse.  She was a good nurse.  She came home at night and could hardly stand.  She worked for 16 hours in a row.  And my grandma called her ‘Keep on Walking’ and ‘Cheer Full of Empty’.  But sometimes it was all too hard.  On those days my mother came home and went right to bed.  Sometimes she didn’t even say hello to me or my grandma. She just pulled the covers to her chin like a curtain coming down on her day.  On those nights, my grandma would sit next to my mother’s bed.  She would stroke my mother’s hair. She didn’t call my mother any fancy names.  She just called her ‘Baby’ and my mother would cry and fall asleep.

The only name my grandma gave I didn't like was to my first boyfriend.  She called him ‘Mr. World Of Trouble’.  She said it right to his face.  He was a big boy with almost no brains.  He got so mad, I thought he was going to hit my grandma.  But he just walked out of the house.  And I stopped seeing him.  He ended up killing two men in a bank robbery.  He sure was Mr. World of Trouble.

When my grandma was 84 years old, she got sick.  The doctors tried to find out what was wrong with her.  They checked her heart.  They checked her lungs.  But she got thinner and thinner.  Her skin was so pale you could see right through it.  She was in the hospital for three days and her breathing got soft, like falling snow.

The day she died, she was talking to me. The sunlight was falling into the room like a promise. My grandma was telling me how the doctors were all wrong.  For a while she had been lost.  She hadn't known how to put a name to what was happening to her.  But she had had some time to think about it.  Time to think about her life.  84 years of life.  And she had a name for this thing that was happening to her now.  She looked at me, little spots of white floating like a hint of something far away in her eyes.  ‘Cracked Tea Cup Full of Joy’ she whispered to me.  The secret name of the slow goodbye that is life.

The curriculum planners at my school need some grammaring

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

The school year has started and that means, at least at my school, 'All Check.'  'All Check.'  Oh how I hate the sound of you.  It's a series of review classes and short tests which cover everything the students were supposed to have been taught last year.  Usually the foreign teachers don't have anything to do with All Check.  But I guess, seeing as how I've been at the school for four years now and most of the teachers have been fooled into thinking I speak a passable Japanese, they slotted me in to teach a few "All Check" classes.  I got a nice fat envelope filled with tests and a one page explanation of the grammar point--or points--I needed to cover in my fifty minute lesson.  Now I was lucky.  The teacher who sits next to me seemed pretty upset about her teaching content.  I peeked at her sheet and here's what I saw:

• What a beautiful flower. à How beautiful this flower is!
• What a kind boy he is. à How kind that boy is!
• What a fine singer she is. à How fine that singer is!

I have to admit my ignorance.  Looking at those sentences, I am slightly perplexed about what is supposed to be taught.  And completely befuddled as to why the period morphs into an exclamation mark. 

Anyway, I didn't get anything that bad.  I was supposed to teach:

         - must have + past participle

example: He must have missed the bus.

         - may have + past participle

example: She may have seen that movie already.

         - cannot have + past participle

example: My teacher cannot have made that mistake

         - should have + past participle

example: You shouldn't have forgotten your crayons.

                                           (author's note: why crayons?)

These are the actual grammar points and example sentences I was given.  The first thing that struck me was the fact that 'must', 'may' 'cannot' 'should(n't)' can pretty much be moved around freely between the sample sentences without causing any kind of structural problems or meaning difficulties.  Depending on the type of teacher, he very well 'may have made that mistake,' or in a worse case scenario 'must have made that mistake' which might/may/should lead you to scold him with a tart 'you shouldn't have made that mistake.'  I put the my 'All Check' envelope to the side of my desk and decided to think about it.  I'm good at putting things on the side of my desk.  And the higher that pile gets, the harder it is to see me.  Which is also nice.

The other day I signed up for a TESOL IA virtual seminar on Grammaring with Elka Todeva from SIT.  I didn't have any real deep interest in grammaring.  Mostly I wanted to know more about the people who have helped support and served as mentors to my PLN.  Turned out that Grammaring was something I really needed to know about.  From the very start, when Elka flashed a slide and said that Grammaring was "a set of options," and "a liberating force," I was hooked.  She said a lot more, but you know what?  You can access a recording of the whole seminar, right here.  And you absolutely should. First off, you will learn to teach the hell out of indirect and direct articles, which alone is worth it.  But if you don't know all about grammaring already, it will also introduce you to input flooding.  That's what I am talking about baby, input flooding.  Instead of introducing a discreet grammar point, or giving a nice series of disconnected examples, flood the students with the grammar in use.  Let them not only see how it works, but experience it and learn it in and through use.

So that's what I decided to do today.  I picked up that fat envelope of tests and my grammar points and headed off to class before the bell rang.  On the board, I drew a picture of two stick figures sipping steaming cups of coffee in a café.  I'm no good at drawing bodies, but very good at steaming cups of coffee.  I labeled the stick figures Tom and Mari and drew and extra chair with a big question mark above it.  Then I wrote the following conversation on the board:

          Tom: Where is Kathy?  She should have been here by now.

          

          Mari: She lives so far away from the station. 

                     She must have missed her train!

          

          Tom: You know, she left her day-planner at my house.  

                     She may have forgotten   that we were meeting here.

          

          Mari: No way!  I talked to her last night.  

                     She can't have forgotten!

 

              (author's note: watch out for exclamantion mark overuse syndrome)

I had the students practice this dialogue in pairs in a 4/3/2 activity.  As they practiced, I erased words here an there from the board until they were saying it from memory.  But one dialogue does not a flood make, or at least it seemed the waters of understanding had risen to pond level at most, so I drew a stick figure of what I thought looked like an angry teacher and a defiant student on the board.  Then I jotted up the following dialogue:

          Teacher: Tom, where is your homework?  

                           You ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿　done it last night.

          

          Tom: But I did do my homework!  I put it in my bag.  

                           Someone ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ stolen it! 

          

          Teacher: Who do you think stole your homework?

          

          Tom: It ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ been Mari.  

                           She was standing near my bag.

          

          Teacher: No!  It ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ been Mari.

          

          Tom: How do you know?

          

          Teaching: She didn't turn in her homework either!

As you probably guessed, this time around, aside from 'cannot' students were free to slot in the phrases wherever they liked.  I grabbed my eraser and we practiced until the board was blank. 

And then I gave out the tests.  I am happy to say that the average grade was 90%.  Which was much higher than the previous tests.  That might be do to the power of grammaring.  It also could be do to the fact that in the other classes they were learning insane things like, "What a beautiful flower. à How beautiful this flower is!" 

So I'm down with this whole grammaring thing.  Tomorrow's grammar points are "must/have to/should/can" in the simple present tense (not sure of the logic of putting the past-tense before the present tense, but maybe my school is just working on a deeper, cosmic wavelength).  I'm gonna grammar flood them again.  But this time, I want to move a bit faster so we can finish up with a minimum-prompt dialogue.  If I had had enough time today, I was hoping to have the students complete the following:

Mary: You ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿ homework!

Tom: 　No!  You ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿　yesterday!

Mary: What? You ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿　last month!

Tom: No way. You ＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿　from the minute I met you!

But perhaps fortunately for the students, we ran out of time.  Which was a very good thing, because they might have developed dangerously high levels of toxicity from exclamation point over-exposure.

(Final author's note: this blog post really doesn't do justice to the depth of thinking behind grammaring.  I feel pretty guilty about that.  So please, please, take a listen to Elka's seminar, or maybe even buy Diane Larsen-Freeman's Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring.  I just did.)

    

Measurements (A short story for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

509 words total
98.00% within GSL  (98.6% excluding proper nouns)
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 89.7
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 3.3

I like to measure things.  I know exactly when it started.  It was July 16, 2002.  I was 7 years, 214 days, 3 hours and 6 seconds old.  I was looking at an old wall clock in the living room.  I said to my mother, “I’m hungry.”  She pointed to the clock.  She said, “Dinner is in 10 minutes.” 

I watched the second hand move.  600 seconds later, I sat down at the dinner table.  34 seconds after that, I began to eat.  I don’t remember what we ate.  But I do remember that it took me 1022 seconds to finish my meal.  At the time, I was only 239,252,406 seconds old, but I knew something important.  If you could measure time, time which you cannot see, or hear, or touch, or taste, you could measure everything.  And I did.  

I measured myself twice daily (currently 174 centimeters), how fast my mother talked (210 words per minutes), and how slowly my father walked up the stairs (1.3 kilometers per hour).  It was after I entered high school that I began to measure things most people claimed could not be measured.  For example, loneliness.  Loneliness can be measured in eye contact.  An average person who only looks into another person’s eyes 37 times per day will feel lonely.  When I was fourteen, I spent 62% of my days in loneliness.  And fear, fear is when your heart beats 21.3% faster than average.  I spent one month in fear, studying for my high school entrance examinations.  

I had an old friend.  Her name was Tammy.  She used to hold my hand with 30 kilograms of force or 7 kilograms more than the average girl her age.  Her eyes were blue.  Color is a wave.  The blue of her eyes was 472 nanometers long, which is the same as the ocean on an August afternoon.  She told me that really, I could not measure anything.  She said that 1 centimeter, 1 second, 1 kilogram were just ideas and did not really mean anything.

The day before we left for our separate universities, we ate in the best restaurant in town.  We ate cake topped with gold leaf.  The cake had 248 calories, enough to keep a body running for 3218.69 meters.  She said goodbye to me 19 times.  The last time she said goodbye, she looked down at a 37.4 degree angle.  She did not look up when I said I would see her again soon.

At university, I learned to measure the electrical force of surprise, the speed of memory, and the time loss of confusion.  I wrote papers which my friends did not read, but still said were wonderful.  I moved into my own office on the first floor with a big window.   But lately I think that maybe Tammy was right.  Maybe measurements do not mean quite so much as I think.  When Tammy used to talk to me, her breath smelled almost sweet.  It was a special kind of smell.  I think it might have been vanilla.  But I cannot be sure.  And I have no idea of how to measure a thing forgotten.

Hand in a pool of generosity

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

The other month, while my wife was planning a charity event for an educational fund in Tohoku, I was getting ready to present on vocabulary word cards at a teacher training in Tokyo.  We were up late most nights, but not as exhausted as one might expect.  My wife said that planning the event was like dipping her hand into a big pool.  Every email she sent off, every favor she called in, resulted in wave after wave of generosity and she was just enjoying watching how far those ripples moved along.  I wasn’t feeling quite so positive, but I learned bunches about how to teach vocabulary, which has never been one of my strong points.  The training went well enough, especially since I had great sources to build on.  A bunch of the ideas came from John Fanselow and included the following ditties:

  - When deciding on a word's meaning from context, start simple.  Within the passage, does the word have a positive or negative connotation?

- It’s easier to remember and recall a word which has been placed in a category.  Let the students devise categories.  After all, they’re the ones that have to personalize the word.  Student’s might take a word like coffee and categorize it as black, hot and cold, adult, whatever.  The more ways they can categorize a word the better.

- Don’t let students write the entire word down on vocab cards.  Partial information, which results in more effort for recall, is going to lead to a better chance of the word sticking around in long-term memory.  This is related to Craik and Lockhart’s (1972) “Depth of processing hypothesis.”

I also lifted some key points from Scott Thornbury’s (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary.  Great book.  If you’re looking for word card activities for helping students hold onto new vocabulary, here are just a few:

-       Word chain: groups are given a set of 4 word cards which are placed in a row.  The must make a chain of sentences which naturally progresses from the first to the last card.  There is no limit of the number of sentences they can make to get from one end of the chain to the other.

-       No vowels: Students take a bunch of word cards and copy the words down on a separate piece of paper leaving out all of the vowels. They then exchange lists with another student and try to guess their partner’s words.

And then I tried to come up with some very 2012 activities which included:

-       What’s That Word, Twitter Style: write a series of tweets to other people in the class using your vocabulary words.  Students read the tweets and make a running list of which word in each tweet they think is the target vocabulary word.

I also introduced the General Service List to the teachers.  So why is this list so important?  Well, not only does Paul Nation consider the GSL to be, “the best of the available lists,” but with those 2000 words, students would know 90% of the words in a teenage novel (Waring and Nation, 1997).  Which is pretty good, but not quite good enough for easy comprehension of a text written for native speaking high schoolers.  In fact, in order for students to learn new words from context, students would have to get up to the 98% level of recognition (Hu & Nation, 2000).  Still, just the first 1000 words of the list would be enough to comprehend the first three levels of most graded reader series.  So, for any extended reading program which uses graded readers, the GSL can help students focus on the words they need to steadily improve their comprehensions skills. 

Now there are some great Internet sites which let you check if a word (or even a full text) is on the GSL.  My favorite happens to be Joyce Maeda’s Frequency Level Checker. But some of the schools in my private school system have strict cell-phone policies.  And not all the students have smart-phones.  Most of the PDFs of the GSL on the internet are small-fonted, long, hard to read things which my students would happily lose soon after I passed them out.  So imagine my surprise, when I got to school today and in my email in-box, I found this:

Vocabulary (GSL) Alphabetical 1st 2nd 1000 Words

That’s right, the GSL broken down into the first and second thousand words and alphabetized for easy use.  Trent, one of the teachers at the Nagoya Campus whipped this up.  And with an easy to use GSL list, students can make much more productive use of their time. 

Now let me just add that I’m not saying students should only study words that are on the GSL.  Students are attracted to words for all kinds of reasons.  Usefulness is just one of them.  I know that when I was actively studying Japanese I made a conscious effort to learn a whole bunch of low frequency words just because the way they rolled around in my mouth felt good.  ‘Toriaezu’ is a fine example.  Love that word (kind of means, “anyway, for now…”).  If a student falls in love with a word, they should learn it, GSL or not.  But for words that don’t entice passion, the GSL is a great time management tool. 

And just one more caveat, Trent’s version of the GSL only contains the root vocabulary word.  If you use it, you might have to do some work with the students around word families.  And of course, don’t expect your students to be using their dictionaries properly.  They probably aren’t.  Some serious dictionary training is probably in order.  But that’s a totally different post.

The training up in Tokyo was a three-day affair and I used it as the basis of my action research proposal for my dip TESOL.  But I kind of tried to noodle my way around having a clear evaluative component.  I got nailed on that.  And I also decided one evening that that I had done enough reading for my literature review simply because I had gone way over my word limit for the proposal.  And I got nailed on this as well.  My mentor Dana was very gentle and tried to assure me that any feedback was meant to be constructive (and boy was it), but that didn’t make me feel any better about the fact that I had pretty much known I was slacking when I wrote the proposal.  And I’m grateful that she didn’t just say, “Come on Kevin!  There are no short cuts.  You are going to be using this proposal to shape your class.  Do the best you can for your students, not the minimum you need to do to pass a dip TESOL unit!” 

I’m going to fix the proposal up.  I’m going to make sure that there is no doubt in my mind that it will positively impact what and how my students learn.  And I’m going to be thankful for the chance to make it better.  But I’m also going to try and be a little kinder to myself and remember that the whole process is kind of like dipping my hand in a pool.  I’m sending out the ripples and watching as they spread.  I have a shiny new GSL list for my students and a chance to share it with all of you.  I have a team of teachers who are willing to see how we can use the GSL and word cards effectively across a bunch of schools.  And I have the time and support of my PLN to help me put together an action research which puts the students first and let’s me develop as a teacher as well.  That’s a lot to be grateful for, and much more than I realized I had when I started studying for my dip TESOL eight moths ago.


(just a word about the whole "support of my PLN" thing.  That is actually a desperate cry for help.  Help which can be delivered in comments, emails, tweets or cryptic messages attached to pigeons.)

(Oh, and my wife managed to raise $1,000 for Tohoku.  Probably why she enjoyed dipping her hand in the pool more than I enjoyed writing my vocab presentation.)

References:

Craik, F.I.M & Lockhart, R.S. (1972) Levels of processing: a framework for memory research.  Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, 268-284.

Hu, M. & Nation, P. (2000) Unknown Vocabulary Density and Reading Comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13 (1), 403-430.

Nation, I.S.P & Waring, P. (1997) Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists.  In N. Schmitt & M. McCathy (eds) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition,and Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S. (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary.  Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Learning to Call Something from Nothing (Short fiction for ELLs)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Learning to Call Something from Nothing

436 words total
96.33% within GSL
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 90
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 3.1


There was a girl who loved to blow bubbles.  Every morning before she went to school she ran into the garden and blew bubbles.  In the winter, she wore a heavy coat.  In the summer, she didn’t wear shoes and her hair was cut short.  Every afternoon, when school ended, she ran home and blew bubbles again.  Her mother was worried.  She said, “It’s strange.”  The girl’s father said, “What’s wrong with bubbles?”  The girl’s father and mother did not understand each other very well.

One day the girl blew a bubble, but there was something different about it.  The girl looked at it floating in front of her.  It was square.  That whole summer, the girl blew square bubbles.  As she got older, she learned to blow triangles and half circles.  By the time she was in high school, she could put the shapes together and make trees and houses, cars and buses.  She could make whole little towns floating through the air.

The girl didn’t join clubs.  She didn’t play sports.  Her mother was still worried, but the girl studied enough to keep her teachers happy.  And she kept her bubbles a secret.  She couldn’t say why she kept it a secret.  The girl became a woman.  She could now blow bubbles of cats, dogs, and horses that ran through the air.  She worked as a designer at a small clothing company.  Her clothes were simple, clean, and very popular.

Years later, she sat in her own garden, with her own children, and her own husband.  Her daughter was holding a small green wand in one hand and a small bottle of soap in the other.  The woman reached out and took the bottle and wand from her daughter.  It was a late spring day.  The sky was darkening.  The woman dipped the wand in the soap and held it to her mouth.  She whispered something.  It sounded like a prayer.  One perfect butterfly, purple against the evening sky floated free and up.  The butterfly waved its wings slowly.  It passed in front of a white moon.  It disappeared in an instant.  Her son, a boy of three who liked to break things, asked his mother to teach him how to make a butterfly.  The woman’s daughter, who was a quiet girl and understood more than her brother, did not ask anything.  She already knew.  You did not make anything in this world.  You worked until you found the right way to call for what you needed.  If you were lucky, the call was answered.

Rolling Along

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I finally finished up my Action Research proposal today. Which also means I finished up the action research unit of my dip TESOL. I could write heaps about the experience. But I won't. Because I don't have any idea exactly what happened. Out of all the units so far, this was the one that, more often than not, just left me feeling kind of puzzled about what I was supposed to be doing. And that wasn't the fault of my trainer who was always there for me and answered a really inexcusable number of emails. But maybe after I collect my data and get everything into some kind of concrete form, I'll feel a little bit less nonplussed. If you are interested in my action research proposal, please feel free to have a read, although it's not too exciting.

Which is actually what this post was supposed to be about. Excitement. You see, I got to just about the end of my proposal and spent two days not finishing it. I would tinker with a paragraph here or find a new bit of research I wanted to cram in there, but mostly I spent the two days just wishing I would wake up and the action research proposal fairies would have written the last few paragraphs for me while I was asleep.

But this morning I woke up and had an email in my in box which was almost as good as a ARP-fairy. A friend had sent me a friend's paper on vocab cards. And this paper was so alive, the writer so believed in the importance of vocabulary cards in a language class, that the sense of conviction ran right through every single word on the page. I finished up the article on the train into work and realized that what was missing from my writing lately, both the words on the page and the feeling when I sat down at the computer, was that sense of conviction.

* * * 

This afternoon at school, we had a welcome party for the new first year students. Three of my International Course students came early to work as hosts. I hadn't seen them for a while, so when they walked through the door, I asked them, "How was your spring break?"
     Tosh looked at me with wide eyes and shook his head, like someone trying to get water out of their ears.
     I asked him again, "How was your spring break?"
     He shook his head and slowly repeated to himself, "Howasya spring break?"
Well, at least he caught spring break. But Ri-chan and Sari didn't do any better. So I handed them blank word cards and we did a little dictation. Once they got the phrase, "How was your…" written down on their cards, everything was fine and dandy and I learned that Tosh did nothing but sleep, Ri-chan very much enjoyed shopping, and Sari had to work at her part time job everyday. Two other International Course students came later and I gave them a word card each and told them to go and talk to Tosh and Ri-chan and Sari. By the end of the party, all the Interntional Course students had eaten too many chocolate chip cookies (not homemade, but very yummy in a chewy plastic kind of way), chatted up the first year students, and practiced the phrase "How was your…" to the point of near fluency.

After the students went home, I sat down on the computer and starting working on my action research proposal. I'm not sure if if I was writing with conviction, but that's OK. It's a research proposal.  If it was filled with strong convictions now, they would probably get in the way of finding out what I need to find out. But at least I wanted to write the paper. I didn't want to just finish it, like that one last thunk of a mallet that drives the stake through dracula's heart. I wanted to write it. To work on it. To help it take shape.

As English teachers we spend a lot of time talking about motivation. We search for the underlying factors that impact motivation, we draw links between motivation and autonomy. We argue about how to dilineate this motivation from that motivation. But how can we know what really motivates our students? Today I got an unexpected email, watched as a group of students made a piece of language their own, and ate as many chocolate chip cookies as I wanted. Today I finished writing my action research proposal. There was a feeling of excitement which carried over from event to event.  A certain easy rhythm developed over the course of the day.  Sometimes I think motivation is simply a form of emotional momentum.  If that's true, than one of the most important parts of our job as teachers is to help the students who are already on their way to just keep rolling along.